Let's get rid of the BCS

The President says we should get rid of the Bowl Championship Series that attempts to pit #1 v. #2 in the final bowl game of the year and go to playoffs.

I say we should go in the opposite direction. Get rid of the BCS but instead of a playoff, make the national championship even more mythical, the way it used to be. Emphasize conference championships and traditional conference vs. conference bowl games the way the Rose Bowl used to always match the champions of the Pac 10 and Big 10.

Why do we want a winner-take-all system in college football? Let each of the two dozen teams that win their bowl game go home happy.

The BCS system has damaged scheduling because colleges are all trying to go undefeated to be in the top 2, so the top teams schedule patsies at home for their non-conference games.

Moreover, winner-take-all encourages rich guys like Phil Knight (Oregon, which beat USC Saturday) and Boone Pickens (Oklahoma St., which lost to Texas) to waste fortunes trying to win national championships. We should be looking to decrease spending on college football, a zero sum activity. (This ties into my contention that conservative Red State zillionaires waste a lot of their charity giving on trying to beat other conservative Red State zillionaires at college football, when they could be giving the money instead to, say, me.)

Maybe we should have one Open Conference for twelve teams (USC, Texas, Florida etc.) divided into East and West divisions who play for an annual Open Championship. "Open" means minimal test score and grade standards for athletes: i.e., gladiators. If the best thing a kid can do in his life is play football, he shouldn't have to stop at age 18 just because he's dumb as a box of rocks.

On the other hand, schools that don't care about the student part of student-athlete, such as USC, shouldn't be competing with schools that do, such as Notre Dame.

If you impose test score standards on your football recruiters, you can still put together a decent offense (there are plenty of quarterbacks and offensive linemen who are legitimate C students or batter at state flagship universities), but you really can't compete on defense.

So, let everybody else besides the 12 regional powerhouses form conferences that set their own standards for recruiting and hire their own enforcement police for student athletes.

For example, when I was at Rice, I thought it would make sense to have a conference with Rice, Vanderbilt, Tulane, Georgia Tech, and, uh, well, I'm starting to run out of high-brow Southern schools that play Div I football, but you get the idea. It would be fun to have a football team composed of guys who on average project out to be say, at least the 20th percentile in the class in GPA. And if that reduces the quality of the scholarship athletes enough that a bunch of walk-ons get some playing time each year, all the better.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Are liberals or conservatives smarter?

Jason Richwine considers the evidence.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Daniel Dravot on nation-building in Afghanistan

From my September 26, 2001 essay on John Huston's movie The Man Who Would Be King, which was based on the Kipling short story.

Yet, if a war in Afghanistan does prove winnable, which it should, ought the U.S. to undertake a long-term benevolent occupation to attempt to turn that desolate land into a peaceful "normal country?" Huston's movie offers a skeptical perspective.

Initially, the two pirates' plan succeeds wildly. The pagans believe Daniel is a god, the son of Alexander. The high priests place the great Greek's crown upon his head and offer him a treasure room full of rubies and gold. All Daniel and Peachey need to do to become the two richest men on Earth is to fill their packs, wait four months for the snows in the Hindu Kush to melt, and then walk out.

While awaiting Spring, Daniel amuses himself by playing at being king. To the applause of his new subjects, he enforces peace, dispenses justice at traditional durbars, sets up granaries to insure against famine, and builds bridges to tie the country together.

When the passes finally open, Peachey learns to his horror that Daniel now feels too responsible for his people to grab the loot and run. The grandiose nation-building urge that in the 1990's helped inspire American interventions in Somalia, Haiti, and Bosnia has infected him. "A nation I shall make of it, with an anthem and a flag," King Daniel thunders. ...

Catastrophe ensues.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Why are we still there?

Nicholas Kristof opines in the NYT:

Dispatching more troops to Afghanistan would be a monumental bet and probably a bad one, most likely a waste of lives and resources that might simply empower the Taliban. In particular, one of the most compelling arguments against more troops rests on this stunning trade-off: For the cost of a single additional soldier stationed in Afghanistan for one year, we could build roughly 20 schools there.

It’s hard to do the calculation precisely, but for the cost of 40,000 troops over a few years — well, we could just about turn every Afghan into a Ph.D.

What's the old Heinlein saying?

Never try to teach a Pashtun tribesman to be a Ph.D. It wastes your time and it annoys the Pashtun tribesman.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

H.L. Mencken Club Meeting this weekend

Friday thru Sunday at the Holiday Inn Conference Center at the Baltimore-Washington Intl. airport. At the moment, it looks like I'll be speaking Friday evening, Saturday afternoon, and Sunday morning.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Situational Awareness

Tony Perry of the LA Times reports:

As Marines train to deploy to war zones, there is daily discussion about how to detect and disarm the buried roadside bombs that are the No. 1 killer of Marines in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Military researchers have found that two groups of personnel are particularly good at spotting anomalies: those with hunting backgrounds, who traipsed through the woods as youths looking to bag a deer or turkey; and those who grew up in tough urban neighborhoods, where it is often important to know what gang controls which block.

Personnel who fit neither category, often young men who grew up in the suburbs and developed a liking for video games, do not seem to have the depth perception and peripheral vision of the others, even if their eyesight is 20/20.

The findings do not surprise Army Sgt. Maj. Todd Burnett, the top enlisted man with the Pentagon-based Joint Improvised Explosive Device Defeat Organization, or JIEDDO, which conducted the study. He's made multiple deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan and ridden in more than 1,000 convoys and, on 19 occasions, been in a vehicle hit by a roadside bomb.

The best troops he's ever seen when it comes to spotting bombs were soldiers from the South Carolina National Guard, nearly all with rural backgrounds that included hunting.

"They just seemed to pick up things much better," Burnett said. "They know how to look at the entire environment."

Troops from urban backgrounds also seemed to have developed an innate "threat-assessment" ability. Both groups, said Army research psychologist Steve Burnett, "seem very adaptable to the kinds of environments" seen in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Video game enthusiasts are narrower in their focus, as if the windshield of their Humvee is a computer screen. "The gamers are very focused on the screen rather than the whole surrounding," said Sgt. Maj. Burnett (no relation to the research psychologist).

About 800 military personnel at Twentynine Palms and several other bases took part in a complex set of vision and perception tests, follow-up interviews and personality tests. Test subjects were asked to find hidden bombs in pictures, videos, virtual reality exercises and open-air obstacle courses, including on pitch-dark nights.

Although many of the findings remain classified -- lest the enemy discover what the U.S. has learned about its methods of burying and detonating the devices -- military officials agreed to discuss the eyesight portion of the study.

The study was completed in June, and its results are being circulated for peer review to researchers with security clearances. It took 18 months to carry out and cost $5.4 million.

After eight years of war and billions of dollars spent on electronic detection, the best technology for spotting improvised explosive devices, or IEDs, remains the sharp-eyed Marine, soldier or sailor.

Back in the 1960s, the Air Force officer qualifying exam had a 100 item Officer Biographical Inventory. The latter was a personality test that asked about "past experiences, preferences, and certain personality characteristics related to measures of officer effectiveness." It inquired into enthusiasm for sports and hunting, and was only vaguely correlated with IQ.

(A retired Air Force test psychologist told me that this section was later dropped because women did very poorly on it, and urban and suburban youths didn't do as well as country boys. "It was politically incorrect, but"—he recalled wistfully—"It was a predictor of success as an officer.")

As for the guys who defuse the roadside bombs in Iraq and Afghanistan, the EODs, plain old IQ is one necessary factor. Kathryn Bigelow, director of last summer's fine Iraq movie The Hurt Locker, pointed that out in all the interviews she did.

Beaks: One thing I don't think people take into account with these guys is how highly intelligent they have to be to get assigned to a bomb squad unit.

Bigelow: That's an aspect that's very, very critical. You're invited into EOD [Explosive Ordinance Disposal] because you've scored on an aptitude test at a very high level. You're definitely a rare kind of individual. And to amplify what you're saying, you have to take into consideration that this is a volunteer military. So these are individuals who have an extremely high IQ and have chosen - after being invited into EOD - to take on the most dangerous job in the world.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

"Mad Men"

My Wednesday Taki's Magazine column on the TV serial "Mad Men" is up.

Read it at Taki's and comment about it below.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Jews v. Episcopalians on IQ

A reader writes:

According to the National Longitudinal Study of Youth 1997, the average IQ of Jewish youngsters is 111.3, and Episcopalians 110.3.

Other groups include.
Catholic 101.5
Mormons 103.0
Atheist 105.4

Jews are less than half as likely as the average to join the military, whereas Episcopalians are only slightly below average in enlistments.

Along those lines, here's a 2002 article I wrote on the demographic breakdown of the U.S. armed services personnel based on what religion they choose to have stamped on their dog tags.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Episcopalians v. Jews on IQ

One commenter makes the point that on some tests of intelligence measures, Episcopalians outscore Jews.

The evidence is mixed.

Inductivist looked at the average scores on the ten word vocabulary test included in the General Social Survey and found:

Mean IQ for whites

Episcopalian 109.9
Jews 109.0
Lutheran 107.4
Mormon 105.7
Presbyterian 102.3
United Methodists 101.8
Southern Baptists 98.0
Assembly of God 94.5
Pentecostal 92.2

In the post-Civil War period, it was common for ambitious young men flocking to New York to make it big in business to convert to Episcopalianism. That way older business leaders who were Episcopalians could see you were in church every Sunday. A lot of the converts were coming from post-Puritan religions such as Congregationalism, or from Methodism. So, Episcopalianism became very upper class. That's why some upper crust boarding schools have Catholic-sounding names like "St. Paul's" -- Episcopalianism is Anglicanism (i.e., Church of England) which, due to Henry VIII, was Catholicism minus the pope and plus divorce.

Arthur Hu has the 1990 average SAT scores by religion and by race. Note that scores averaged about 100 points lower than today before "recentering" in mid-1995. The two letter prefixes refer to race (Wh = white, AS = Asian, Al = All, etc.). In this, white Episcopalians barely outscored black Unitarians, and were 60 points behind Jews.

Race Religion             Number   Math + Verbal SAT
Wh Unitarian              1,745    1073
Wh Quaker                   894    1037
Wh Judaism               25,600    1030 * Jewish Avg
Al Quaker                 1,009    1029
As Hindu                   4138    1029
Al Judaism               27,374    1026
As Presbyterian            3195    1022
As Angelican                197    1019
Al Hindu                  4,741    1012
Wh Hindu                     82    1004
As No Pref                17987    1001
As U Methodist              662     998
Wh Mennonite                952     990
As Unitarian                 49     986
As Episcopal                444     983
Wh Chistian Sci             830     979
Wh No Pref               99,076     979
Al Mennonite              1,063     974
As Methodist               1108     973
As Quaker                    25     973
Wh Mormon                 6,400     972
Wh Episcopal             19,555     970
As S Baptist Conv           332     966
Af Unitarian                 64     966 *Top Black
Al No Pref              137,305     963
Wh Luth Missouri          8,038     963
Wh Un Church of Christ    7,066     962
As Wesleyan                  32     960
Al Luth Missouri          8,624     959
Al Episcopal             22,109     957* Episcopal
Wh Presbyterian          32,019     956
Wh Angelican              1,765     956
Al Chistian Sci             989     955
Al Presbyterian          37,353     955* Presbyterian
Al Un Church of Christ     7826     951
Wh U Methodist           23,470     949
Al Mormon                 7,594     948
Wh Other                 20,125     947
Wh Lutheran in Am        23,380     943
As Christn Reformed         298     943
Wh No Answer             44,397     942
Al U Methodist           26,037     939
Wh Afr Methodist            144     939
As Total                  70739     938* Asian Avg
Wh S Baptist Conv        14,165     938
Al Lutheran in Am        25,020     937
Wh Total                688,933     934* White Avg
As Lutheran in Am           471     931
As Un Church of Christ      253     930
Al S Baptist Conv        15,729     929
As Judaism                  218     925
Wh Christn Reformed       2,235     924
As Baptist                 3003     924
As Islam                   2184     923

I presume this isn't the complete list. It's probably missing about the bottom half of the scores if the 1990 White Average was 934 and the list peters out at merely 923.

And here's a 2002 report on high SAT scoring groups from Gene Expression:

Average SAT score by religion for 2002, average ~1000, about 40% of each students take it
Unitarian-Universalists	1209
Judaism	1161
Quakers	1153
Hinduism	1110
Mennonite	1097
Reformed Church of America	1097
Episcopal	1096
Evangelical Lutheran Church	1094
Presbyterian Church (USA)	1092
Baha'i	1073

As one reader pointed out, Midwestern-centered faiths get a boost from the ACT effect -- the closer you are to Iowa, home of the ACT, the less likely you are to take the SAT unless you are an ambitious sort who is thinking of going to college on the coasts. So, Iowa has just about the highest average SAT scores in the country because only top students in Iowa take the SAT.

And, no, I don't know where Catholics are in the 1990 list. Another one of Hu's Rules is that Catholics are usually average in everything.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Just because you're a hypochondriac ...

... doesn't mean people aren't trying to sneeze on you (to adapt Henry Kissinger's observation on his paranoia). Mickey Kaus writes:

Shouldn't doctors give patients waiting to see them little hand-held beepers or vibrating devices like those some crowded restaurants give you when you're waiting for a table? That way you could wander around nearby instead of staying in the unventilated waiting room filled with coughing, sneezing people.

Mickey has been one of the few voices in the health care debate bluntly expressing how a lot of us feel deep down: Why, yes, I do want vast amounts of money spent on my personal health care.

Also, everytime I go for a walk, I end up debating with myself another one of Mickey's health/safety views:

Just realized that pedestrians should always go around intersections counterclockwise. Otherwise left-turners get you. You're welcome.

What do you think?

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Absolute Value

From one of the many Anonymice in the comments:

If the financial collapse of September 2008 taught us anything, it's that there isn't a whole lot of difference between having a very large positive net worth and having a very large negative net worth - it's the absolute value of the thing which determines whether you have access to the corridors of power.

P.S. Glaivester points out that people who have a billion in assets and a billion in debts have a net worth of zero, but are still a lot more influential than people with neither. So, maybe the formula should be to add the square of the assets to the square of the debts?

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Obama's played 24 rounds of golf in office

You hear all the time about Obama playing basketball, but he's also enjoyed a sizable amount of time indulging in a less cool sport. From Mark Knoller of CBS's Twitter:

1. And by my count it's Obama's 24th round of golf since taking office. Today he's at Ft. Belvoir in Va.

1. Today - Obama ties Pres. Bush in the number of rounds of golf played in office: 24. Took Bush 2 yrs & 10 months.

(Bush decided to give up playing golf in 2003 as a symbolic sacrifice for being a wartime President.)

I've managed to squeeze in two rounds of golf so far this year, but I guess the President has more time on his hands.

This is by no means a record for a President. Bill Clinton's goal for his last year in office was to break Dwight Eisenhower's Presidential record of a little over 100 rounds in a year in his final year. But since a round of golf and all the ancillary activities takes about six hours, this seems like rather a lot for a first year President.

From Don Van Natta Jr.'s February 2009 article in Golf Digest:

For Obama, golf was appealing because he believed the game would help him connect with his colleagues in the state Senate as well as his constituents in far-flung places like downstate Illinois. Much to his surprise, he soon fell hard for the game's charms. Friends say he became as devoted to golf as he is to his beloved basketball. "Basketball and golf are his one-two," Marvin Nicholson says. "Now, he wants to play all the best courses: St. Andrews, Pebble Beach, Bethpage Black.

"He usually shoots in the mid-90s, sometimes the low 90s," Nicholson says. "He'd be better if he could play more. . . . He's pretty long off the tee . . . very good around the greens, a real good short game. The clubs that give him the most trouble are his long irons . . . or he'd shoot around 90 pretty consistently."

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Changes in Forbes 400 from 1987 to 2009

The Forbes 400 is the most fun of the many rankings published by magazines these days, because individuals rapidly ascend and descend due to changes in fortune. In contrast, most of the other lists are forced to generate some excitement by arbitrarily changing their standards. For example, the US News and World Report list of top universities would be wholly stagnant if they didn't constantly shuffle their rules. For example, one year Cal Tech suddenly vaulted to #1, because the editors had changed the rules to benefit Cal Tech. The next year, Cal Tech had dropped considerably because the rules were changed again. Similarly, Golf Digest's Top 100 Golf Courses list has always featured Pine Valley as #1, except for brief periods when they fiddle with the methodology.

But the Forbes 400 is fun each year, because people really do rise and fall while the methodology stays the same. For example, casino king Sheldon Adelson came out of nowhere to peak at #3 in 2007, but is now down to 26.

But that turnover makes comparisons of two separate years a little tricky because different sectors come in and out of fashion. Nonetheless, comparing Nathaniel Weyl's ethnic breakdown of the 1987 Forbes 400 to one based on Jakob Berkman's work on the 2009 Forbes 400 seems reasonable. Race / History / Evolution Notes has the 1987 and 2009 figures here.

For example, Italians are up and Armenians are down. (Keep in mind that these are just estimates, and there are lots of complications in the way of coming up with perfect counts.)

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

"Why Are Jews Liberals?"

I review Norman Podhoretz's new book here in VDARE.com.

Comment upon it below.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

British government elects a new people

From the Daily Mail:

Huge increases in immigration over the past decade were a deliberate attempt to engineer a more multicultural Britain, a former Government adviser said yesterday.

Andrew Neather, a speechwriter who worked in Downing Street for Tony Blair and in the Home Office for Jack Straw and David Blunkett, said Labour's relaxation of controls was a plan to 'open up the UK to mass migration'.

As well as bringing in hundreds of thousands to plug labour market gaps, there was also a 'driving political purpose' behind immigration policy, he claimed.

Ministers hoped to change the country radically and 'rub the Right's nose in diversity'. But Mr Neather said senior Labour figures were reluctant to discuss the policy, fearing it would alienate its 'core working-class vote'.

On Question Time, Mr Straw was repeatedly quizzed about whether Labour's immigration policies had left the door open for the BNP.

Writing in the Evening Standard, Mr Neather revealed the 'major shift' in immigration policy came after the publication of a policy paper from the Performance and Innovation Unit, a Downing Street think tank based in the Cabinet Office.

The published version promoted the labour-market case for immigration but Mr Neather said unpublished versions contained additional reasons.

'Earlier drafts I saw also included a driving political purpose: that mass immigration was the way that the Government was going to make the UK truly multicultural.

'I remember coming away from some discussions with the clear sense that the policy was intended - even if this wasn't its main purpose - to rub the Right's nose in diversity and render their arguments out of date.' The 'deliberate policy', from late 2000 until 'at least February last year', when the new points-based system was introduced, was to open up the UK to mass migration, he said.

Mr Neather defended the policy, saying mass immigration has 'enriched' Britain and made London a more attractive and cosmopolitan place.

Sir Andrew Green, chairman of the Migrationwatch think tank, said: 'Now at least the truth is out, and it's dynamite. Many have long suspected that mass immigration under Labour was not just a cock-up but a conspiracy. They were right.

'This Government has admitted three million immigrants for cynical political reasons concealed by dodgy economic camouflage.'

The chairmen of the cross-party Group for Balanced Migration, MPs Frank Field and Nicholas Soames, said: 'We welcome this statement which the whole country knows to be true.

'It is the first beam of truth that has officially been shone on the immigration issue in Britain.'

Who knew?

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Arnold Palmers

My kid has started insisting on stopping at the Arco station to buy an "Arnold Palmer." That's a half lemonade and half iced tea beverage that, back in the 1960s, Arnie "invented" -- i.e., he requested a bartender in Palm Springs mix it up for him, and onlookers started asking for the "Arnold Palmer drink."

This product comes in a big can slathered in pictures of Palmer.

Man, is there any kind of pro sport where growing old is kindlier than golf? Arnie is 80 years old. He hasn't won a major championship since 1964. Yet, he still rakes in millions in endorsements.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

UPDATED: Ricci II: New Haven sued by black fireman

In Slate, Stanford law professor Richard Thompson Ford is trumpeting:

Sure enough, last week, just as New Haven prepared to promote a group consisting almost entirely of white fire captains and lieutenants based on the exam results, a black New Haven firefighter, Michael Briscoe, filed a disparate-impact lawsuit against the city. Like Frank Ricci, Briscoe is a sympathetic plaintiff. He received the highest score of any candidate on the oral portion of the lieutenant's promotion exam. But he isn't eligible for promotion because the city based 60 percent of each candidate's score on the written exam. On this part of the test, Briscoe—like most black candidates for promotion—did comparatively badly. ...

UPDATED: Fortunately, the test scores were posted by Adversity.net, and we can figure out who Briscoe is pretty easily.

Actually, Briscoe did very badly on the written test in any sense. Although he scored a 92.08 on the oral test, he only scored a 59 on the blind-graded written test, putting him 66th out of the 77 test-takers on that test. He scored 13th out of 19 blacks on the written-exam. Overall, counting both the oral and written exams, Briscoe finished 24th, with five blacks ahead of him. Why is Briscoe more deserving than the five blacks who did better under the rules?

Briscoe had the largest divergence in scores between the two tests of any of the 77 test-takers, implying his high score on the oral part could well be a fluke. Oral tests are more likely to produce unreliable scores because the sample size of questions per hour of testing is smaller due to the lower bandwidth of oral vs. written communication.

Or, perhaps Briscoe is a smooth talker who can impress outsiders in the short run, but lacks the job knowledge to maintain the confidence of underlings in even the medium run.

This is a classic example of why Disparate Impact is worse than plain old racial quotas. There are five black guys who are better under the rules than Briscoe, but now we're supposed to rip up the rules and use a different system that will promote Briscoe ahead of the five more competent blacks, as well as push a lot of less qualified whites and Hispanics ahead of more qualified whites and Hispanics.

Moreover, if you changed the weighting on the Lieutenant's test to favor the Oral component over the Written component, that would have Disparate Impact on Hispanics!

Briscoe's claim is a perfect example. Why didn't black candidates do as well as whites on the written exam? Black firefighters argue that because whites are more likely to come from families where firefighting is a legacy (for instance, one New Haven captain's father and grandfather both served as fire chief in New Haven), they are more likely to get help from a network of friends and relatives in studying for the written exam. Few blacks have such family connections—in large part because blacks were deliberately shut out of firefighting jobs until the 1970s, when black firefighters won discrimination suits in New Haven and in many other cities nationwide. ... So heavy reliance on a written exam, if it gives an advantage to legacy candidates, could perpetuate the evils of past discrimination.

Damn white fire geeks always studying how to save people's lives!

Kind of like how Slate's other Ricci expert, Emily Bazelon got her job writing about the law by being the second cousin of Betty Friedan and the granddaughter of the most powerful non-Supreme Court judge in America, David Bazelon. Except she didn't have to pass a written exam to get the cushy Truman Capote Fellowship in Creative Writing and the Law at New Haven's Yale Law School.

That violates Title VII, unless the exam is job related and there are no less discriminatory alternatives. New Haven's written exam may be as good as any written exam could have been: The Supreme Court in its ruling in favor of the white firefighters in Ricci pointed out that the city's written test was carefully developed by a professional company to be job-related and to avoid racial disparities. But Briscoe argues that the written exam did not, in fact, test for the skills that fire captains and lieutenants need on the ground; instead, it rewarded rote memorization. As for alternatives, Briscoe says that the city could have relied more heavily on the oral exam, which required candidates to respond to real-life firefighting and training scenarios. Neither the city nor the company that designed the exam defended making it worth 60 percent of the promotion score. Briscoe also points out that New Haven could have used an assessment-center model, which tests candidates through simulations of real-life job challenges. Many other cities use assessment centers successfully.

Although Ricci was often described as a challenge to affirmative action, getting rid of a flawed exam isn't affirmative action and doesn't push diversity at the expense of merit.

Yes, it is affirmative action. The reason Professor Ford wants more weight given to the oral test is because the oral test is inherently flawed.

The key difference between the oral and written test is that the written test was blind-graded while the grading of the oral test was racially rigged from the outset by making almost two-thirds of the judges minorities, which is highly unrepresentative of the distribution of senior firefighting leadership expertise.

The whole point of civil service examinations is to eliminate favoritism, which is why the union insisted on a 60% weighting in favor of the blind-graded test over the easily-rigged oral test.

I would strongly recommend that the Supreme Court fast-track Briscoe's case. I'd look forward to reading Justice Alito's opinion.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

More on Forbes 400 by ethnicity

Race / History / Evolution Notes has taken Jacob Berkman's list from the Jewish Telegraphic Agency a step farther and broken out all the obvious ethnicities of the 2009 Forbes 400.

My initial estimate of the ethnic breakdown:

Northwestern European 53.5%
Jewish [or part Jewish] 35.25%
Italian 3.5%
East Asian 2%
Indian 1.25%
Middle Eastern 1.25%
Greek 1.25%
Eastern European 1.25%
Hispanic 0.5%
Black 0.25%

The black Forbesian is Oprah.

One of the Hispanics is John Arrilliga, son of Basque immigrants. (Do Basques consider themselves Hispanic? I know a 93-year-old Basque lady who arrived in America in the early 1920s, and still has her Basque accent.)

The other is billboard baron and Angels owner Arturo Moreno, a genuine Mexican-American from a family of 11 in Tucson.

In these estimates, Northwestern European serves as kind of a catch-all for people who don't obviously jump out at you as something else. So, maybe there's, say, a Bulgarian whose immigrant father changed his name to "Johnson" to fit in. He would get listed as Northwestern European at first glance. And "Northwestern European" doesn't recognize the fairly sizable ethnic divide between the Protestants and Catholics (Irish and more than a few Germans), who tend to have gone to separate schools.

The Jewish percentage is probably a little high because it includes some some people who are half or even just quarter Jewish by ancestry. (It may however miss some others who are part Jewish.) My preference is to allot by fraction of ancestry, but that's a lot of work.

The small number of Slavs jumps out at you. The various kinds of Slavic-Americans tend not to show up in large numbers in elites (outfielders being one exception: Musial, Yastrzemski, etc.)

RHE Notes has all 400 names and his guess at their ethnic identification, which is always interesting.

For example, after 20 years of watching the back of Larry David's head as he plays George Steinbrenner on Seinfeld, I'd assumed that the owner of the Yankees was Jewish. There's a natural tendency to assume that anybody with a Germanic-language surname who has made himself conspicuous in the media is Jewish, but that's by no means always true. Various confident-sounding individuals on the web say Steinbrenner isn't Jewish. And that's how RHE Notes lists Steinbrenner: as Northwestern European.

Steinbrenner's father's Great Lakes shipping firm was named Kinsman, perhaps after the neighborhood in Cleveland, which was a center of Cleveland's Jewish community at one point (but not at other points). His mom's name was Haley. George's upbringing seems Midwestern gentile: Culver Military Academy, Williams College, Delta Kappa Epsilon (same fraternity as the Bushes and three other Presidents), US Air Force officer, graduate assistant at Ohio State to football coach Woody Hayes, etc. Steinbrenner does have an advanced degree, but it's a Master's in P.E., which is about the least Jewish advanced degree imaginable.

So, I dunno.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Whatever happened to environmentalists' enthusiasm for 3rd World population control?

Apparently, there's another famine coming in Ethiopia. Matthew Yglesias has links to reports by the BBC, Oxfam, and CAP all listing strategies for fighting Third World hunger, with lots of interesting stuff about how Ethiopia's system of land inheritance is suboptimal and so forth.

What's striking to me as an old-timer, though, is how little emphasis the great and the good give to Third World population control these days, as compared to the 1960s and 1970s, when it was a Center-Left obsession.

Back in the 1960s and 1970s, people on the left talked about the need for population control in the Third World all the time. Now, that suggestion seems to be largely off the table, apparently because it’s considered racist.

Yet, it's not like the problems of population growth in Ethiopia have vanished of their own accord.

According to the CIA World Factbook, Ethiopia’s population is over 85 million, up from 32 million in 1975, despite the famous killer famine of the 1980s. Its current total fertility rate is 6.12 babies per woman per lifetime. The annual population growth rate is 3.2%. At that rate of growth, Ethiopia’s population will be over 140 million in just 16 years.

A Voice of America article in 2006:

At an estimated population of 77 million people, Ethiopia is second only to Nigeria – currently sub-Saharan Africa’s most populous nation. And Ethiopia’s population is growing at a rapid pace, adding some two million people every year. Experts are warning the Horn of Africa nation may not be prepared to handle the consequences of such a population boom.

Ethiopian scholar and population expert Sahlu Haile says the situation in his country is grim.

“Drought and famine continue to plaque the country,” he said. “And although the government is investing a considerable amount of resources for social services, including health and education, this is being neutralized by the number of people needing these services. Deforestation, soil erosion and the resulting shortage of rain and water is creating conflict among people who have been living together peacefully for years.”

By the year 2050, the Washington-based Population Reference Bureau says Ethiopia’s population will grow by an astounding 120 percent.

That means in 44 years, the population of Ethiopia is expected to be around 169 million people.

It is this projection that has Sahlu, a senior program advisor at the Packard Foundation, worried – worried about the strain such huge population growth will put on society.

“The environment continues to deteriorate,” he said. “Not only in the vulnerable areas of the highlands of northern Ethiopia but even in the south and southwest of the country, which are considered the breadbasket of the country. A senior government official said because of population pressure, they are obliged to apportion land, not in hectares, but in square meters. He said, and I quote, the situation is ‘dramatic,’ end quote.” ...

But, Sahlu points out the Ethiopian government is beginning to take the issue of overpopulation seriously. He says it has come up with policies to help reduce the birth rate, currently averaging six children per woman in Ethiopia.

One part involves a major public health initiative. Over the next three years, the government has set a goal of bringing family planning services to Ethiopia’s rural areas by providing basic health training to more than 25,000 young women and deploying them to each village in the country.

And the population may indeed be receptive to such a program. Sahlu says nearly 78 percent of married women in Ethiopia either want to space their births or end them altogether.

But, Sahlu says the lack of money for contraceptives presents a serious problem.

“The 2005 contraceptive deficit is estimated at $12 million,” he said. “And if these young girls go out and promote family planning in the countryside, that is only going to aggravate the situation.”

He adds the Ethiopian government has committed itself to cover 50 percent of the cost of contraceptives, a goal, he says, that may not be realistic.

All experts agree that much work remains to be done to address Ethiopia’s high fertility rate. But those efforts are in competition with a number of other important development issues in Ethiopia: food security, basic infrastructure, healthcare and education.

So, they're short $12 million bucks for contraceptives? $12 million? Can’t, say, Al Gore write them a personal check?

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

How many of the Forbes 400 are Jewish?

Since the early 1980s, Forbes has been publishing its list of the 400 richest Americans. Periodically, various people have tried to estimate the percentage who are Jewish. My recollection is that they usually come up with about 22% to 25%, although of course that varies as different sectors of the economy boom and bust. For example, Texans were heavily represented on the first list during the early 1980s oil boom, but quickly diminished and were replaced by New York real estate tycoons, who gave way to Silicon Valley tech prodigies, and so on.

Jacob Berkman of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, who specializes in reporting on Jewish philanthropy, spent a couple of days on Google with the 2009 Forbes 400, and came up with a list of Jewish Forbes 400 members for use by Jewish charities:

At least 139 of the Forbes 400 are Jewish

But that's just one man's estimate. For example, he includes Meg Whitman of E-bay, who is running for the GOP nomination for governor of California, but most of what I see about her suggests she is largely Boston Brahmin. And some of his "maybes" on his overall list of 149 possibilities are definitely not Jewish, such as the two Bechtels, who have made billions out of Saudi Arabia. (One of Bechtel's key executives in Ibn Saud's kingdom was Cornelius Stribling "Strib" Snodgrass, whom I'm going to guess wasn't Jewish.)

Note the helpful comments from Santos L. Halper below Berkman's posting for recommended changes, some of which Berkman has gone back and incorporated. And, of course, there are the usual issues of how to count people with one Jewish parent, converts, and so forth.

So, I don't know exactly where Berkman stands at this point. The most accurate number might not be 139 anymore. But it's definitely at least 30% (120), and "about one-third" would appear to be a reasonable approximation.

Part of the increase in Jewish numbers is due to the proliferation of Pritzkers of Chicago (there are now 11 on the Forbes 400). They've been rich a long time (an old friend of mine was their nanny in Europe in the 1970s). Presumably they are multiplying due to inheritance.

But the increasing importance of Wall Street in the economy in recent years no doubt played a major role in this increase over the historic baseline.

If the Forbes 400 is about one-third Jewish, that's less than the one-half Jewish Atlantic 50 of most influential pundits. Tom Friedman's chances of someday being on both lists took a hit this year when his father-in-law Matthew Bucksbaum, who was #205 on the Forbes 400 in 2008, dropped off the list in 2009 when his shopping mall company filed for bankruptcy. He must not have been reading his son-in-law's economics advice books closely enough.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Tom Friedman: America's schools failing to educate enough rainmakers

I've never been to India, but I've somehow gotten the impression that Untouchables are unfortunate. Apparently, I was misinformed because Thomas Friedman, who has been to India lots of times, entitles his NYT column "The New Untouchables" and his New Untouchables are sitting pretty.

I've mentioned before that the NYT op-ed page is one of the fringes of the Steveosphere. But, really, I've got it so much easier than those poor bastards. All I have to do each day is use Occam's Razor to find the simplest explanation for whatever subject comes up. (A long time ago an old venture capitalist who had given dozens of depositions under oath told me: "Always tell the truth; it's easier to remember.") But to be an NYT columnist, you have to wield Occam's Butterknife like Mickey Mouse in the Sorcerer's Apprentice.

For example, I could have happily written half of Friedman's new column, but I couldn't have pounded out the other half with a straight face:

Last summer I attended a talk by Michelle Rhee, the dynamic chancellor of public schools in Washington. Just before the session began, a man came up, introduced himself as Todd Martin and whispered to me that what Rhee was about to speak about — our struggling public schools — was actually a critical, but unspoken, reason for the Great Recession.

There’s something to that. While the subprime mortgage mess involved a huge ethical breakdown on Wall Street, it coincided with an education breakdown on Main Street — precisely when technology and open borders were enabling so many more people to compete with Americans for middle-class jobs.

And middle-class houses, let's not forget, but then most people who read Friedman have never been told that in the first place, so how can they forget what they've never learned?

In our subprime era, we thought we could have the American dream — a house and yard — with nothing down. This version of the American dream was delivered not by improving education, productivity and savings, but by Wall Street alchemy and borrowed money from Asia.

A year ago, it all exploded. Now that we are picking up the pieces, we need to understand that it is not only our financial system that needs a reboot and an upgrade, but also our public school system. Otherwise, the jobless recovery won’t be just a passing phase, but our future.

Importing tens of millions of people from the bottom of the Latin American pyramid of productivity didn't exactly help, either.

Nor did letting much of our manufacturing go overseas with the idea that we'd all get rich off selling each other ever more complicated financial instruments.

“Our education failure is the largest contributing factor to the decline of the American worker’s global competitiveness, particularly at the middle and bottom ranges,” argued Martin, a former global executive with PepsiCo and Kraft Europe and now an international investor. “This loss of competitiveness has weakened the American worker’s production of wealth, precisely when technology brought global competition much closer to home. So over a decade, American workers have maintained their standard of living by borrowing and overconsuming vis-à-vis their real income. When the Great Recession wiped out all the credit and asset bubbles that made that overconsumption possible, it left too many American workers not only deeper in debt than ever, but out of a job and lacking the skills to compete globally.”

This problem will be reversed only when the decline in worker competitiveness reverses — when we create enough new jobs and educated workers that are worth, say, $40-an-hour compared with the global alternatives. If we don’t, there’s no telling how “jobless” this recovery will be.

A Washington lawyer friend recently told me about layoffs at his firm. I asked him who was getting axed. He said it was interesting: lawyers who were used to just showing up and having work handed to them were the first to go because with the bursting of the credit bubble, that flow of work just isn’t there. But those who have the ability to imagine new services, new opportunities and new ways to recruit work were being retained. They are the new untouchables.

Oh, now I get it! Being an "untouchable" is now a good thing. Just like "the world is flat" is a smart thing to say.

Friedman's New Untouchables are basically the Old Rainmakers -- lawyers who could bring in big accounts.

That's just swell ... So what Friedman is telling us is that even for those people who pass the Bar Exam, our K-19 education system is failing them because, while it is turning them into lawyers, it isn't turning them into rainmaker lawyers.

That is the key to understanding our full education challenge today. Those who are waiting for this recession to end so someone can again hand them work could have a long wait. Those with the imagination to make themselves untouchables — to invent smarter ways to do old jobs, energy-saving ways to provide new services, new ways to attract old customers or new ways to combine existing technologies — will thrive. Therefore, we not only need a higher percentage of our kids graduating from high school and college — more education — but we need more of them with the right education.

As the Harvard University labor expert Lawrence Katz explains it: “If you think about the labor market today, the top half of the college market, those with the high-end analytical and problem-solving skills who can compete on the world market or game the financial system or deal with new government regulations, have done great. But the bottom half of the top, those engineers and programmers working on more routine tasks and not actively engaged in developing new ideas or recombining existing technologies or thinking about what new customers want, have done poorly. They’ve been much more exposed to global competitors that make them easily substitutable.”

Those at the high end of the bottom half — high school grads in construction or manufacturing — have been clobbered by global competition and immigration, added Katz. “But those who have some interpersonal skills — the salesperson who can deal with customers face to face or the home contractor who can help you redesign your kitchen without going to an architect — have done well.”

Just being an average accountant, lawyer, contractor or assembly-line worker is not the ticket it used to be. As Daniel Pink, the author of “A Whole New Mind,” puts it: In a world in which more and more average work can be done by a computer, robot or talented foreigner faster, cheaper “and just as well,” vanilla doesn’t cut it anymore. It’s all about what chocolate sauce, whipped cream and cherry you can put on top. So our schools have a doubly hard task now — not just improving reading, writing and arithmetic but entrepreneurship, innovation and creativity.

Bottom line: We’re not going back to the good old days without fixing our schools as well as our banks.

Okay, so our schools have to not only teach the times tables, they have to teach salesmanship and entrepreneurship. Hmmhmm, my impression from watching The Wire was that our public schools were already turning out more than enough crack salesmen but not enough kids who were good at arithmetic.

You know, this is almost enough to make you wonder if globalization isn't all that Tom Friedman has cracked it up to be.

I kind of have the impression that quite a few Americans, like, maybe, two or three hundred million of them, don't possess either the IQs or the personalities to be rainmakers. Are they permanently obsolete in the world that Friedman has been such an energetic cheerleader for?

Fortunately, all we have to do is Fix Education.

And, fortunately, as David Brooks has been informing us recently, IQ is so yesterday and personality hardly even exists.

You know what else our schools have been failing to do? They've been doing a terrible job of teaching our children another crucial skill for survival in Tom Friedman's globalized economy: how to marry a billionaire's daughter.

Tom did it, so how hard could it be?

Let's get Michelle Rhee and Arne Duncan cracking on this right away. As a start, all Washington D.C. public schoolchildren should make annual field trips to the 7.5 acre Friedman-Bucksbaum compound in Bethesda for socializing with Tom's daughters.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Good News! Annual harvest worker shortage solved

This is the first autumn in memory when we haven't been deluged with articles about how we're all going to starve because of looming shortages of illegal aliens to pick crops.

Remember the Pearanoia of 2006 when the New York Times, among others, ran a front page article about how pear growers in Lake County, CA couldn't find enough pear pickers (at the wages they felt like paying)? But in 2009, Google News finds only one mention all October of Tamar Jacoby, chief lobbyist for Guest Peasant Programs.

Congratulations to the federal government and financial industry for working closely together to stave off for at least one year this annual threat to the survival of humanity by merely doubling the unemployment rate. Bravo!

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Hiding in Plain Sight

From my Wednesday Taki's Magazine column:

Everybody complains about how dumbed-down movies have gotten. Here, for example, are representative quotes from A.O. Scott of the New York Times in “Spoon-Fed Cinema” bemoaning the state of cinema c. 2009: “infantile,” “male immaturity,” and “a program of mass infantilization.”

Yet, nobody ever seems to mention one obvious change in audience composition over the decades that has exacerbated blockbusteritis. And only one renegade filmmaker has used this trend in demographics to be able to afford to make innovative movies; but nobody wants to talk about him, either.

Read it there and comment about it here.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

F. Scott Fitzgerald's finances

Here's an article based on the tax returns of F. Scott Fitzgerald from 1919 to 1940. Fitzgerald averaged about the contemporary equivalent of a half million bucks per year for two decades, mostly from short stories (and movie sales of short stories, such as Benjamin Button.) Short stories were a remarkably lucrative line of work between the wars, since the big magazines like the Saturday Evening Post were the chief venues for advertising nationally distributed products like cars. After 1950, advertising dollars moved to television, and the really big magazines like Life, Look, and the Post folded up within a couple of decades.

People used to like to read short stories because each one was a story and it was short. Now, though, nobody reads short stories except other short story writers. And the stories always end with an "epiphany" in which the main character realizes his life is hopeless, as utterly doomed as, say, the contemporary short story author's life.

I've never seen cause and effect concerning the decline of short stories untangled. Did short stories become unpopular when they became depressing? Or did they become unpopular first, which then made the short story writers all depressed?

Novels don't come with advertising, so they weren't as lucrative for Fitzgerald. (By the way, why don't novels include advertising? I'm slowly making notes for a novel and I would be happy to have the book include advertising.) Fitzgerald only made $8,397 in royalties off The Great Gatsby during his lifetime. It didn't become a classic until WWII, when the Pentagon gave away paperback novels to soldiers. For whatever reason, it struck a chord with servicemen at war, and has since become a high school staple. Fitzgerald's grandchildren make a half million per year off the 84-year-old book.

That's pretty wild that Fitzgerald's descendant are making over a half mil per year off his books 69 years after he died. Do copyrights last forever these days? I recall that 98-year-old Irving Berlin was sore when his 75-year copyright on the song Alexander's Rag Time Band ran out in 1987, so I guess Congress decided 75 years just wasn't long enough.

I think the reason why everybody loves Gatsby is because everybody wishes they'd been invited to Gatsby's parties, but the book also lets you feel morally superior to the soulless people who, unlike you, were invited. So, what's not to like?

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

WaPo: Quarterbacks Gone Wild

From the Washington Post:

The wide-open era
Led by some of the NFL's current greats, quarterback play is as exciting and efficient as ever

By Mark Maske

"There are a lot of quarterbacks playing at a high level, more than I've seen in a long time," former Washington Redskins quarterback Joe Theismann said.

If this indeed becomes one of the greatest seasons for quarterbacks, collectively, in league history, the question will be: Why now?

The answer seems to be that it's a combination of having a collection of excellent quarterbacks and a set of circumstances highly favorable to good quarterback play. ...

But it's more than just an assemblage of good quarterbacks. It's also the most passing-friendly era in NFL history. The game has been wide open since the 2004 season, before which the league cracked down on clutching-and-grabbing tactics by defensive backs with a directive from the competition committee to officials to strictly enforce the rule prohibiting defensive contact against receivers more than five yards downfield.

Actually, after the pass-happy 2004, referees tended to shift against the offense again, as Aaron Schatz of FootballOutsiders pointed out in 2005. Maybe the way the refs are calling has shifted back in 2009 to more 2004-like customs? The NFL can change things by winks and nudges as well as by overt rule changes.

The game changed immediately. That season, Peyton Manning threw 49 touchdown passes, breaking Dan Marino's 20-year-old NFL season record, and had the highest passer rating in league history, at 121.1. Brady threw 50 touchdown passes two seasons ago to set a new record. Last season, Brees had only the second 5,000-yard passing season in NFL history. Add to that the fact that the league has cracked down on hits on quarterbacks by defenders, and stopping the top passers seems to have become next to impossible.

"I think the rules benefit the passing game right now," said Tim Hasselbeck, a former quarterback for five NFL teams, including the Redskins and New York Giants. "You have the way pass interference and the plays down the field are being called. You have quarterbacks being protected by the rules, and I think that obviously plays into it. It helps guys stay healthy and play every week."

Peyton Manning and Roethlisberger are on pace for 5,000-yard passing seasons. Perhaps more strikingly, eight NFL quarterbacks currently have passer ratings above 100. Six more have passer ratings above 90. Compare that to last season, when only the San Diego Chargers' Rivers had a passer rating above 100 at season's end, and eight others topped 90.

The passer rating is a figure designed to assess overall throwing efficiency through a complicated formula that takes many statistical elements into account. The system, which gives a passer a rating between zero and 158.3, has its detractors. But it most often seems to confirm what knowledgeable observers say about which quarterbacks are playing well and which aren't, and this season it affirms that many of the sport's biggest stars are putting on dazzling displays. ...

"I don't necessarily love the passer rating system as a measure of quarterback play," Hasselbeck said. "If a guy is sacked and fumbled, that doesn't show up in the rating. But there are obviously a number of guys playing well, and that's reflected in the numbers. ...

"There are probably 15 to 17 guys where if you were running a team you'd say, 'I definitely feel comfortable building my franchise around this guy in any system. We can get to the Super Bowl with this guy as our quarterback,' " Hasselbeck, now an NFL analyst for ESPN, said by telephone this week. "I do think that's an unusually high number, to think that half the league or over half the league is comfortable with its quarterback situation."

The productive passing seems to be benefiting the teams involved and the league as a whole. The combined record of the clubs with quarterbacks who have passer ratings above 100 is 37-8. The league, meanwhile, has seen its television ratings soar this season; they're up 13 percent over last season and were at a 20-year high five weeks into the season. The sport's rules-makers always have considered a wide-open style of play attractive to fans.

"The ratings have been incredible," Colts owner Jim Irsay said last week at an NFL owners' meeting in Boston. "You really have to understand the sort of numbers we've been able to put up. That's been incredible and it shouldn't be understated."

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

The White City

From New Geography:

Among the media, academia and within planning circles, there’s a generally standing answer to the question of what cities are the best, the most progressive and best role models for small and mid-sized cities. The standard list includes Portland, Seattle, Austin, Minneapolis, and Denver. In particular, Portland is held up as a paradigm, with its urban growth boundary, extensive transit system, excellent cycling culture, and a pro-density policy. These cities are frequently contrasted with those of the Rust Belt and South, which are found wanting, often even by locals, as “cool” urban places.

But look closely at these exemplars and a curious fact emerges. If you take away the dominant Tier One cities like New York, Chicago and Los Angeles you will find that the “progressive” cities aren’t red or blue, but another color entirely: white.

In fact, not one of these “progressive” cities even reaches the national average for African American percentage population in its core county. Perhaps not progressiveness but whiteness is the defining characteristic of the group.

Read the whole thing.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Quarterback statistics

When evaluating groups of quarterbacks, I tend to use the NFL's much maligned "passer rating" statistics. It synthesizes a "quarterback's completion percentage, passing yardage, touchdowns and interceptions" into one number.

There are a lot of problems with it:

- Almost nobody knows how to calculate it. Wikipedia has the formulas here. Hence, nobody knows what a good number is. The NFL average is typically in the low to mid-80s. A rule of thumb is that 100 is excellent.

- Because it includes touchdown passes v. interceptions, which are inherently small sample sizes, it's not terribly stable from year to year. For example, according to passer rating, the sixth best single season of all time was Milt Plum's in 1960 when he threw 21 touchdowns v. only 5 interceptions. Plum was a good quarterback, but that year's passer rating was anomalous. Luck plays a sizable role in a single season's touchdowns and interceptions. Nonetheless, when you aggregate over multiple seasons or across multiple players, the larger sample sizes make the emphasis on touchdown passes and interceptions more reliable. After all, there is a pretty high correlation between them and winning.

- Passer Ratings is a "Pedro Martinez statistic" in that it doesn't give credit for durability. A brilliant but fragile pitcher like Pedro Martinez looks very good in sophisticated statistics like ERA but not quite so great in simple counting statistics like career wins. Similarly, guys who played forever like Dan Marino, Brett Favre, and John Elway don't look quite as good as the guys with shorter careers like Steve Young and Jeff Garcia. (Garcia is an interesting case in that he was a career journeyman -- his statistics might be inflated because he would get plugged in when the situation was ripe for his particular talents and benched when they weren't.) Similarly, Daunte Culpepper, is ranked 11th all-time in career passer rating, but has only managed to start about 9 games per season on average.

On the other hand, passer rating has advantages over simpler qb statistics like yards passing. If you rush for 150 yards per game, you are probably better than somebody who rushes for 100 yards per game, because rushing is debilitating, so there are diminishing marginal returns. On the other hand if you pass for 300 yards per game, you aren't necessarily better than somebody who passes for 200 yards per game. Throwing a football isn't that tiring. Also, although it's less true in today's passing-oriented offenses, but in the past, the big yardages were typically wracked up by quarterbacks who fell behind early and had to mount desperate comeback attempts, often unsuccessful.

Then there are the problems with all current quarterback statistics:

- Quarterbacks are much more dependent on their receivers, running backs, and offensive lines than, say, baseball pitchers are on their teammates, so San Francisco quarterbacks throwing to Jerry Rice, for example, will rate better than guys throwing to people who weren't Jerry Rice.

- There's no home field adjustment like in modern baseball statistics. This goes to the heart of the long-running Peyton Manning vs. Tom Brady dispute. Manning usually has better passer ratings, but he plays his eight home games per season indoors, while Brady plays outdoors in suburban Boston.

Nonetheless, I think history has largely vindicated passer rating. Why? Notice that 12 of the top 15 quarterbacks of all time in career passer rating are currently active. This suggests that it measures pretty accurately the direction that improvements in offensive play are taking football in order to win games.

Other statistics have been invented. For example, Adjusted Net Yards per Pass Attempt looks like a pretty good single number stat based on yards per attempt: It dispenses with completion percentage and augments yards per attempt by adding 20 yards per touchdown pass and subtracting 45 yards per interception. It also subtracts yards lost when sacked.

This has the advantage of making the statistical differences more comprehensible than passer rating. For example, over his career, Peyton Manning's team has averaged a 7.13 yard gain everytime he passed (or was sacked), while his younger brother Eli Manning only averages 5.39 yards. So, if both brothers drop back to throw 30 passes per game, Peyton's team will gain 214 yards and Eli's team only 162 yards. I would guess that Peyton's extra 52 yards is worth somewhere between a field goal and a touchdown more points per game, plus it keeps the other team's offense off the field a little more.

Yet, the results for ANY/A are pretty much the same as for passer rating, though. Steve Young drops from #1 to #3 for career, and Peyton Manning moves up to #1 with 7.13 yards per attempt. (Young doesn't get credit for his rushing yardage, which seems a shame, but that's a tricky thing to account for because a lot of quarterbacks rush mostly on 3rd and 1 quarterback sneaks. If they average 2 yards per carry, they're doing fine, but including that would lower their overall yards per play average. I mean, you don't want to penalize the QBs who are good at sneaks worse than the ones who are no good at sneaks and thus never attempt them. On the other hand, it would be nice to find a way to credit quarterbacks who were genuine rushing threats like Young and Michael Vick.)

The top of the ANY/A list continues to be dominated by active players, with Young, Joe Montana, and Dan Marino the only old-timers in the Top 10.

Among the 29 active quarterbacks on the all-time Adjusted Net Yards per Pass Attempt career list, Culpepper is the highest ranking black quarterback at 12th with an average of 5.97 yards per attempt, Donovan McNabb is at 15th, David Garrard at 16th, Byron Leftwich at 20th, Jason Campbell at 21st, and Michael Vick at 26th (4.91). Some of these guys were good to very good runners, especially when they were younger, so they were probably a little more effective overall than this ranking suggests.

Overall, not too bad, but not at all "the future of football," as was widely hyped as recently as a few years ago.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Rush Limbaugh and black quarterbacks

In all the brouhaha over Rush Limbaugh being prevented from buying part of an NFL team, has anybody noticed that his endlessly denounced remark -- the one he actually said in 2003, not the libelous made-up ones we've been hearing lately -- about the media overrating black quarterbacks for political reasons has been largely vindicated?

Six years later, 2009 is turning out to be a bust for black quarterbacks in the NFL. Not a single one is having a good season.

Seven of the 36 most active quarterbacks are black. David Garrard is probably doing best so far: on Sunday, he got Jacksonville back to .500, but he's only #20 in passer rating.

On Sunday, Jason Campbell got benched at halftime by the Redskins. Former #1 draft pick JaMarcus Russell did win a game for Oakland, by beating Donovan McNabb 13-9. Seneca Wallace is back on the bench in Seattle. In Tampa Bay, Byron Leftwich has been replaced by young Josh Johnson, who is 32nd in passer rating.

With 140 yards rushing in six games, Garrard is the only black quarterback with at least 100 yards on the ground 30% of the way into the season.

Meanwhile, white quarterbacks are having a great year, with seven with passer ratings over 100, versus only one at the end of last year, although presumably top end ratings will come down as sample sizes increase and the weather worsens.

You could argue that black quarterbacks did better 20 years ago in 1989, when Warren Moon finished 4th in passer rating and Randall Cunningham 14th.

Overall, it looks like the first half of this decade, 2000-2004, was the peak for black quarterbacks in the NFL, while 2005-2009 has marked a surprising regression.

I have to admit that I wasn't expecting that. I thought they'd gradually get better. Back in 2003, during the first Limbaugh-NFL brouhaha, I wrote in VDARE.com about the emergence of black quarterbacks:

It's been a slow process, however, with frustration on all sides. Football teams are like armies—it takes them a lot of trial and error to figure out how to use a new kind of weapon effectively.

Perhaps surprisingly, Hollywood has already produced a good dramatization of the complicated opportunities and difficulties posed by black quarterbacks: Oliver Stone's 1999 football movie Any Given Sunday. It's not Stone at his best (or worst), but it's a perceptive and fair depiction of the black quarterback issue by a man who gave up all hope of being politically correct years ago.

Dennis Quaid plays the white drop-back quarterback who gets too banged up to play. In desperation, old-school coach Al Pacino replaces him with a young black QB (an undersized Jamie Foxx) who has a chip on his shoulder because, throughout his career, coaches have tried to convert him to other positions.

Foxx doesn't like studying the playbook. He just makes things up as he goes along, with often wonderful (but sometimes disastrous) results. This delights the sportswriters, who declare him "the future of football." It drives Pacino crazy.

Eventually, Pacino and Foxx begin to respect each other's strengths. They reach a compromise. Foxx finally bears down and learns the playbook. Pacino gives him more freedom on the field to make things happen. Together, they win The Big Game.

This Hollywood happy ending will probably eventually come true in NFL, too. Lots of talented men are working hard to make it a reality.

Meanwhile, expect no toleration for those so rude as to point out that the emperor has no cleats.

Well, six years later, my latter prediction is certainly valid, but not my former one.

What happened?

Well, I don't watch enough football to have much of an opinion, but here's a hypothesis. When my older kid played football in a league for 9 and 10 year olds, the coach came out into the huddle and called plays and the teams usually took about two minutes between plays to get themselves organized. Football is just really complicated. The best team in the league just simplified matters by putting their best athlete, a black kid, at quarterback and letting him do whatever he wanted with the ball.

Similarly, whenever my younger kid got roped into playing Madden, a game he never paid much attention to, he'd always pick Michael Vick as his quarterback and just have him run around with the ball, because that was a lot easier than trying to have a quarterback throw to receivers running routes.

From that perspective, all this "future of football" stuff about quarterbacks who can run is backwards: having one player Do It All isn't the future of football, it's the past. You can't stop a great athlete in PeeWee Football, but you can in the NFL. They apply a lot of brainpower to the problem of stopping one man.

No, the future of football is like the present in the NFL, just more so: having all eleven players execute in tandem ever more sophisticated schemes.

Part of the problem is that getting a mobile black quarterback became a quick fix for having a lousy offense. Is your offensive line so porous that a 30 year old white guy would get killed? Put a fast young black guy in at quarterback and let him outrun the defenders. At minimum, it will excite your fans.

After a few years of this, maybe you've finally fixed your offensive line, but now your fast black quarterback is banged up and isn't quite as fast anymore, but he's been confirmed in his instinct to take off with the ball and run rather than to step up into the pocket.

This happens at lower levels, too. If you are a high school or college coach, why try to train a fast black quarterback to be an NFL pocket passer when you can win now by just letting him freelance?

In contrast, the white sideline dads of America with tall, strong sons have given up on basketball, and they don't trust their coaches to take the long view of their sons' potential. So, they are paying out of their own pockets to hire personal quarterbacking tutors. (When USC played Notre Dame this weekend, Matt Barkley of USC said he'd know Jimmy Clausen of Notre Dame for years because they have the same off-season quarterback coach, Steve Clarkson.)

So, the quarterback trends of the last half decade are a triumph of Nurture over Nature., and thus should be celebrated by liberals everywhere. (Of course, it doesn't hurt to have Nature and Nurture together on your side, like the two Super Bowl-winning Manning brothers enjoy.)

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

My new VDARE.com column on Asian voters

From my new column in VDARE.com, once again on last week's Asian voter theme:

I’m continuing to think about how the Republican Party—or, more accurately a generic patriotic party that reflects traditional American values—can win national elections if current immigration policy is not altered and the racial balance of the U.S. continues to be shifted by the federal government. ...

Overall, though, the trend toward East Asians voting Democrat stems largely from Democrats winning in the struggle to be chic among elite whites. East Asians tend to be rather conformist. They take quickly to mouthing a society’s dominant platitudes, which in America are increasingly liberal.

I’m reminded of something that surprised me in the late 1990s. My wife worked with a Korean immigrant lady named (unsurprisingly) Ms. Kim. The poor woman’s husband had died in a car crash a few years before, leaving her with two small children to raise.

I was startled to learn that Ms. Kim referred to herself as a "single mother" rather than as a "widow," which seemed to me to be the more accurate and more respectable term.

But that just showed what an out-of-date fuddy-duddy I was. As a relative newcomer to America in the Age of Oprah, Ms. Kim had noticed what I hadn’t: that it’s now uncool for modern American widows to attempt to distinguish themselves from unwed mothers. That would be insensitive and discriminatory.

This doesn’t mean that, in her heart, Ms. Kim agreed with contemporary American mores. After all she grew up in a culture that stigmatizes illegitimacy as strongly as any in the developed world. In 2007, only 1.6 percent of babies were born out of wedlock in South Korea, versus a staggering 39.7 percent in the U.S. (That’s 72 percent illegitimacy among blacks, 51 percent among Hispanics, 28 percent among whites, and 17 percent among Asians).

But East Asians are used to hypocrisy. If the rich and respectable in America demand certain pro forma declarations, well, that’s a small price to be paid to not be excluded from polite society.

Granted, American hypocrisy is bizarrely inverted—rather than pretending to be better than she is, fashionable Americans want the Widow Kim to pretend to be worse than she is. But if that’s what the socially-influential whites in America say they want to hear, well, lip service is cheap.

Hu’s Rule, invented by journalist Arthur Hu in the 1990s, is that Asians tend to be slightly more conservative than their white neighbors—but they tend to choose liberal white neighbors.

Read the whole thing here and comment upon it below.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

You don't say!

Steven D. Levitt's and Stephen Dubner's new surefire bestseller ¡SuperFreakonomics! is being widely anathematized for exhibiting signs of heretical doubts about Global Warming or Climate Change or whatever it's called these days.

In his defense, Dubner blogs on the New York Times in Global Warming in SuperFreakonomics: The Anatomy of a Smear:

Yes, it’s an ancient cliché: a lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes. But it’s still accurate.

Gosh, Steve and Steve, you don't say!

Funny how Levitt became a global celebrity for theorizing in 1999 that legalizing abortion cut crime, even though juvenile homicide rates for teens born in the half decade following legalization were several times higher than for teens born in the half decade preceding legalization, as I pointed out in our debate in Slate in August 1999.

A half dozen years later, he made that theory the centerpiece of Steve's and Steve's Freakonomics despite having no plausible refutation other than it was all based on very complicated statistics that little me wouldn't understand. Then, late in 2005, Boston Fed economists Christopher Foote and Christopher Goetz tried to replicate Levitt's findings and found he had simply made two technical mistakes in his programming that made a hash of his results.

By then, however, Steve and Steve's lie had traveled all the way round the world and their permanent celebrity status was assured.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Number of Mexicans wanting to move to America down ...

... to a mere 39 million in the latest Zogby poll of Mexicans in Mexico. During the housing bubble, a couple of Pew Polls found 40 to 45 million more Mexicans wanting to move here.

Inductivist has all the details, such as:

- Of Mexicans with a member of their immediate household in the United States,65 percent said a legalization program would make people they know more likely to go to America illegally.

- An overwhelming majority (69 percent) of people in Mexico thought that the primary loyalty of Mexican-Americans should be to Mexico. Just 20 percent said it should be to the United States. The rest were unsure.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

City of God and Olympics

From the Guardian:

Two weeks after Rio de Janeiro celebrated winning the 2016 Olympic Games, the Brazilian city was tonight bracing itself for a further night of violence after an intense gun battle erupted in one of the city's favelas and a police helicopter was shot down, killing two officers.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Pandora

A few years ago, I tried out Pandora, the "Music Genome Project" for Internet radio. You tell them a song you like, and they stream over the Internet to you other songs that share similar musical elements, as rated by their staff of professional musicians for about 250 factors. It's not a recommendation system where people who share your tastes tell you what they like, it's based on the actual musical content of the songs.

I found it worked pretty well. But one response was off: I put in Revolution Rock by the Clash, which isn't a rock song at all, but a lazy, joyous reggae ramble. Pandora came back with the punk Career Opportunities by the Clash, which suggests that one of their employees had cut corners and categorized Revolution Rock by title rather than by music. I sent in an email pointing this out, and got a detailed apology from Pandora's CEO, suggesting to me that maybe the boss had too much time on his hands to write to his customers (who weren't paying him, anyway).

So, I'm glad that they've survived financially. Now, there's a long article in the NYT Magazine, "The Song Decoders" by Rob Walker, about how Pandora works:

[CEO Paul] Westergren maintains “a personal aversion” to collaborative filtering or anything like it. “It’s still a popularity contest,” he complains, meaning that for any song to get recommended on a socially driven site, it has to be somewhat known already, by your friends or by other consumers. Westergren is similarly unimpressed by hipster blogs or other theoretically grass-roots influencers of musical taste, for their tendency to turn on artists who commit the crime of being too popular; in his view that’s just snobbery, based on social jockeying that has nothing to do with music. In various conversations, he defended Coldplay and Rob Thomas, among others, as victims of cool-taste prejudice. (When I ran Bob Lefsetz’s dismissal of Pandora by him [for responding to a Jackson Browne song with a Journey song], he laughed it off, and transitioned to arguing that Journey is, actually, a great band.)

He likes to tell a story about a Pandora user who wrote in to complain that he started a station based on the music of Sarah McLachlan, and the service served up a Celine Dion song. “I wrote back and said, ‘Was the music just wrong?’ Because we sometimes have data errors,” he recounts. “He said, ‘Well, no, it was the right sort of thing — but it was Celine Dion.’ I said, ‘Well, was it the set, did it not flow in the set?’ He said, ‘No, it kind of worked — but it’s Celine Dion.’ We had a couple more back-and-forths, and finally his last e-mail to me was: ‘Oh, my God, I like Celine Dion.’ ”

This anecdote almost always gets a laugh. “Pandora,” he pointed out, “doesn’t understand why that’s funny.”

When I started up Pandora again for the first time in years, it remembered all the songs I had entered years before and set up "radio stations" based on each one. Here are some examples of what it came up with in response to my suggestions from the 1975-1990 era. Keep in mind that Pandora doesn't seem to play songs in order of similarity to the source song. It just picks a bunch of songs that are kind of like the one you chose and then it shuffles them. So, each time you return, it offers you somewhat different songs.

Something I hadn't expected was that Pandora performs a sort of factor analysis on your musical tastes. Listening to these songs that I picked out a few years ago plus other ones similar to them, I would say I have post-British Empire upper middle class public schoolboy tastes in music. This may seem odd, but my tastes in songs would seem most natural for a Scottish or northern English lad at a southern English boarding school for toffs, or maybe at Sandhurst, the military academy. I'm not saying that's what people of my generation like that actually liked, just that it would make sense.

Very strange, but it also fits a lot of my taste in authors as well (Waugh, Orwell, Wodehouse, etc.). I now remember how much I liked David Niven's autobiography, who was a Sandhurst grad. And the autobiography of Churchill, another public schoolboy / Sandhurst man.

So, it's no surprise that The Clash were always my favorites. After all, Joe Strummer, despite his appalling teeth, was an upper middle class public schoolboy whose dad, a friend of Kim Philby's, was a diplomat (i.e., spy) for the fading British Empire.

- Steve's Pick: Death or Glory - The Clash ("But I believe in this and it's been tested by research" -- What better lyrics to try out Pandora upon?)
- Pandora's #1 response: Queen Bitch - David Bowie
A very Lou Reed-like electric guitar riff rocker. I guess it points out the influence of Reed on The Clash as well as on Bowie. Still, the Bowie song is missing the inspiring masculine militarism of Death or Glory. Ultimately, David Bowie and Joe Strummer are different personalities and will appeal to different listeners.
- Pandora #2: Career Opportunities - The Clash
Well, that wasn't too much of a stretch! But it does raise the issue that Career Opportunities isn't quite as good as Death or Glory. The Clash had already done a bunch of songs like Career Opportunities, and they weren't putting more basic punk rock songs like that on their London Calling album. Death or Glory, as the title suggests, was intended to top their earlier stuff, or go down in flames.

- Steve: Story of My Life - Social Distortion (Scots-Irish-American roots rock anthem, both self-pitying and uplifting, much like Death or Glory)
- Pandora #1: Death or Glory - Social Distortion
I guess I should have seen this one coming!
- Pandora #2. Sunday Morning Coming Down - Me First & the Gimme Gimmes
A Scots-Irish rock cover of the fine Kris Kristoffersen song made famous by Johnny Cash -- I'd never heard of the band but I liked it a lot.

- S: The Great Curve - Talking Heads (from their Afrobeat groove era when they had 9 musicians)
- P1: Waiting for the Roar - Fastway
Pretty good AC-DCish metal, but not at all like Remain in Light-era Talking Heads.
- P2: Misfit Love - Queens of the Stone Age
This is a grunge groove song that has some similar elements to the Talking Heads song, but is much heavier and less lilting.

- S: In Between Days - The Cure
- P1: A Night Like This - The Cure
For English heterosexual foppish romanticism, you can't beat The Cure. On the other hand, once again, while A Night Like This resembles In Between Days, it isn't as good.
- P7: I Melt With You - Modern English
This has always struck me as the closest predecessor to In Between Days. Perhaps Pandora isn't set up so that the closest match is the first song played?

- S: Heroes - David Bowie (with Brian Eno)
- P1: Space Oddity - David Bowie
I suppose there's some underlying chord structure similarity, but the gestalt is radically different between the acoustic guitar Space Oddity and the shimmering Wall of Synths of Heroes, but then Heroes is a pretty unique artifact. Offhand, I can't think of any songs that Heroes is like. (Holidays in the Sun is also about the Berlin Wall, but not very close musically).
- P2: Bad Girls - Don Felder (of The Eagles)
Nah ...
- P4: More Than This - Roxy Music
Great languid song, although I'd probably put it on my In Between Days Fop Rock station (see above). One thing you learn as you see songs show up on one of your stations that you think are more like the source song for a different station is how related all your songs are. For example, on my Veronica station below, Pandora played a song I had never heard before, Shut Your Eyes by the Shout Out Louds, which sounds just like a more straight-ahead, less shimmering version of In Between Days.

- S: Revolution Rock - Clash (joyous reggae)
- P: Too Late to Turn Back Now - Don Carlos (happy reggae cover of the soul song by Cornelius Brothers and Sister Rose)
Good choice. This is the kind of thing I would never find by myself.

- S: Genius of Love - Tom-Tom Club (offshoot of Talking Heads)
A fun dance song
- P1: Mystereality - Orchestral Maneuvers in the Dark
Nah
- P2: Space Is Deep - Hawkwind
Nah

- S: Veronica - Elvis Costello (w/Paul McCartney)
- P: Takin' Me Back - Cheap Trick
I was a big Cheap Trick fan in the 1970s, so this is a pretty good call. Most of the recommendations on this channel are conventional rock songs, but lack the expertise that McCartney brought to Costello in 1988. (I've always thought that the dyspeptic Costello was McCartney's best possible replacement for John Lennon in terms of pushing McCartney to repress his kitschy side. If McCartney had teamed up with Costello in 1978 right after Costello's first album, who knows how good they could have been together.)

I think that's a basic problem that you can't get around in Pandora: if you like a song not so much because of the style but because it's an expert execution of a style, then Pandora isn't as good as a recommendation site.

Overall, I think the above examples are a little unfair to Pandora, since there isn't a notable dropoff in correlations as the songs go on. Possibly they randomly mix the order of the songs in terms of similarity so that listeners don't get progressively more displeased as they go.

It would be interesting to use Pandora's remarkable database for scholarly purposes. For example, T.S. Eliot pointed out that an artist creates his own "school" of predecessors that nobody noticed had anything in common before. For example, I've always felt that the ancestors of the punk rock of 1976 included from the 1968 to 1973 era: Communication Breakdown by Led Zeppelin, Paranoid by Black Sabbath, and Saturday Night's All Right for Fighting by Elton John, three songs that sounded like they have more in common after you'd heard the Ramones, Sex Pistols, and Clash than before. This giant proprietary database would presumably allow those kind of academic hypotheses to be tested objectively.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer